Internet Collaboration and Systems Administration

How to write a book with someone you don't know: Internet collaboration for the truly geeky

Abstract

It's easy to do a new project: Just take everything you've learned before, and reuse it the best you can. When Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan wrote the new book “The Practice of System and Network Administration” they had a couple challenges: They didn't know each other. They were 5 timezones apart. They had to share and interact with gigabytes of data.

Their solution was to apply their sysadmin tools to the process. To solve their Internet collaboration needs, they used the tools commonly found in Open Source collaborations (CVS, SSH, Make, Apache, and so on). To deal with the fact that they didn't know each other, they applied the “soft skills” concepts presented in the book.

This talk will cover the techniques they used to collaborate on a project that would envelope their entire lives for more than 2 years. Amazingly enough, the book was completed, nobody went crazy in the process, and they've still only met in person 7 times.

While this talk sounds like it's about collaboration, it's really about system administration. The project had security requirements, reliability requirements, bandwidth requirements, processes to be defined, and tons of scripting. We can't imagine how non-sysadmins write books at all!

Bio

Tom Limoncelli has over 15 years of system administration experience and has been teaching workshops on Time Management at conferences since 2003. Tom has worked for both large and small organizations, including Bell Labs and AT&T and has been invited to speak at conferences around the world. Tom's previous book, The Practice of Network and System Administration, is considered a standard reference in system administration.